Date: Tue, 15 Nov 88 10:26:46 EST
From: kranz@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (David Kranz)
Edward Wang is correct that the time in the example is dominated by
bignum arithmetic. I changed the * in factorial to + and got the
following result in T3.1:
I tried a similar experiment in MIT Scheme (using + instead of *,
except a smaller loop to account for smaller fixnums), with the
following results:
(factorial-loop 100) -> 1.03 msec
(factorial-rec 100) -> 1.0 msec
(factorial-lfp 100) -> 2.74 msec
Bill Rozas has expended no small effort in the MIT Scheme compiler to
make the Y combinator produce good results, and these timings are
evidence of that. Still not perfect, but I believe Bill claims that
he can make the output code identical given a bit more work.